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Comment by bryant | Hacker News Reader

riedel (deeper in the comments) is interpreting the headline correctly - if plants absorb 31% more CO2 than previously thought, then it means that their destruction is even worse for CO2 levels than previously believed.

We're not planting more than we're destroying. If we were, this would be great news. But since we're not, this is terrible news.

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> We're not planting more than we're destroying

That is not entirely certain. According to the Global Forest Watch [1]:

   > In 2010, the world had 3.92 Gha of tree cover, extending over 30% of its land area. In 2023, it lost 28.3 Mha of tree cover.

A loss of 0.7% in 13 years. That might sound bad, but my feeling is that this is well below the level of measurement accuracy.

[1] https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/?categor...

The 28.3 Mha loss you quoted is for the single year of 2023, not over 13 years. The sum of yearly losses for (2010, 2023] is 315.2 Mha according to that website.

So about 8.0%, not 0.7%.

Fair enough, it was for one year, my bad.

Here's for 20 years (at the bottom of the page):

  > From 2000 to 2020, the world experienced a net change of -101 Mha (-2.4%) in tree cover.

Oof significantly worse

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